- From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
- Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 20:03:10 +0100 (MET)
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Cc: frystyk@w3.org, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> Actually, preliminary tests with Apache would seem to indicate that the
> user's perceived performance improves on a keep-alive'd server if the
> number of simultaneous connections is set to 2 versus 3 or 4 or 1.
Having at least two pipes open probably creates a "fast" path, which
becomes used for short documents, thus improving the perceived
latency.
> That is in addition to a dramatic decrease in server load.
> I think it is due to slow start and the cost of squeezing multiple requests
> through a single pipe, but these tests were only preliminary.
The "slow start" motivation does not seem appropriate to me. I
don't believe you are allowed to send a second request on a persistent
connection before you get a complete reply. Thus the client -->
server direction almost surely incurs in a slow start, as can be
seen by the following piece of code in tcp_output.c (4.4BSD):
/*
* We have been idle for "a while" and no acks are
* expected to clock out any data we send --
* slow start to get ack "clock" running again.
*/
tp->snd_cwnd = tp->t_maxseg;
In practice, if the request is shorter than an MSS there is no
effect, otherwise it takes an additional RTT just to send out the
request (the importance of headers being small...).
On the reverse path, a similar thing might occur because subsequent
responses are separated by the following events:
+ client realizes the reply is complete
+ the request reaches the server (1/2 RTT)
+ the server parses the request and accesses the
document
and, especially on a busy server, the latter might cause a significant
delay thus triggering a slow start.
Luigi
====================================================================
Luigi Rizzo Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
email: luigi@iet.unipi.it Universita' di Pisa
tel: +39-50-568533 via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy)
fax: +39-50-568522 http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/
====================================================================
Received on Thursday, 15 February 1996 11:11:05 UTC